How do trust networks affect brands?

Trust networks relate to what we know about social networks and the successful commercialization of social networks in Craig’s List, YouTube, and eBay—all disruptive innovations that transform trusted relationships into other forms of value: introductions, entertainment, ad revenues, transactions fees, and cold hard cash, as well as billions in new shareholder wealth.

We introduce the term brandspace to frame several important facets of a trust network.

Consumers Position Thousands of Brands Within Experiential Categories of a Trust Network


Brands live in the hearts and minds of customers in brandspace, initially entering as unproven guests who must earn the right to stay and who must ultimately come to echo the customer’s aspirations and concerns.

In 1994, Jeffrey Rayport and John. J. Sviokla, in the Harvard Business Review, formally introduced the notion of a marketspace to characterize how digital technology and infrastructure change the very nature and behavior of a marketplace. Following their lead, we use the term brandspace to convey a similar idea, taking into account the new interactive relationship that develops between buyer and seller in the Networked Economy.

Brandspace represents a mental map that customers use to organize brands in a marketspace, and thus deal with the 7,000-plus brand messages that they experience every day, incorporating their ability to reach out and touch the source of these brand messages through the Web and other new infrastructures that have emerged.

This concept of the customer organization of brandspace runs contrary to the traditional view that vendors shape customers and create brands. But, in fact, customers have always run the show. We hold that the brand lives in the mind and heart of a customer—without their participation and active collaboration, brands would never come to life. That brands have a vital presence in the customer’s psychology firmly places brandspace in a subjective, personal realm.

Brand managers who fail to understand this critical distinction will invariably violate the psychological boundaries and sensitivities of their customers. In the brandspace of the Networked Economy, where customers talk to each other 24/7, these failures take on global dimensions and significance.

Some brands speak to a person’s core identity. Harley-Davidson customers defy mainstream convention and identify themselves, to some degree, as outlaws or members in good standing of a counter-culture. Dilbert expresses the frustrations of corporate mushrooms—in the dark, covered with manure—speaking to the isolation of workers from meaningful work and expressing a subtle but caustic satire of middle management, and by extension, the corporate executives and corporate culture that foster such stupidity.

Some brands become badges of belonging and signify membership in a community of brand users. Harley-Davidson outlaws band together, proudly displaying the Harley-Davidson logo to instantly signify membership in this select group. Tommy Hilfiger activewear lets geeky suburban teens join the inner city hip-hop tribe—illustrating how Levi’s missed a historic opportunity to build its brand with a new crop of 14-year-olds, how Levi’s brand managers failed to understand the way black inner-city culture drives mainstream U.S. popular youth culture trends, and how music builds tribes of individuals who also use clothes and accessories to signal membership in the tribe.

Moving farther away from the customer’s heart and self-identity we find go-to brands—representing the preferred functional satisfactions associated with particular brands: Crest toothpaste, the Toyota Camry, Banana Republic white T-shirts. These go-to brands tend to attract the largest shares of a market and, once established, tend to maintain their position as market leaders for decades. Consumer research reveals that go-to brands also achieve top-of-mind recall when researchers ask a customer to identify the leading brands of a market category.

Switchable brands represent a host of substitutes and alternatives that replace go-to brands in a pinch: Old Navy khakis vs. Dockers, for example, or an in-house grocery or drug store brand that a customer selects when she feels the need to save money or when she can’t find the go-to brand. Smart brand managers can transform switchable brands into go-to brands if they successfully reposition their brands in a newly created category, usually a subcategory of a larger category, or if they get to the new, unbranded customers as they first enter the categories—for instance, teenagers and young adults first establishing their social identity in terms of brands. Linking the brand to a currency of affection among family and friends can elevate the switchable brand to a go-to, a badge of belonging, or even core identity status in brandspace.

Out-there brands include an even larger group of products and services that consumers have tried, but that, for a variety of reasons, have left them cold and unmotivated to try the brands again. Think of all the bathroom soap brands on supermarket shelves. In the course of visiting friends and family, we will probably use all or most of these brands at least once, but continue to choose our go-to brand or switchable substitute. Perhaps the out-there brand soap has too much perfume, an unpleasant graphic design on the packaging, a price point too high, or a displeasing association from first-hand or second-hand sources. Brand managers with out-there brands must take dramatic steps to reignite consumer interest, taking bold steps beyond the “new and improved” route.

Orphan brands represent products or services about which the consumer has no knowledge and therefore no preference or desire. Most new brands fall in this category. To succeed and better their location in brandspace, they must bring wholly new satisfactions to the market (usually a function of a new technology), aggressively reposition leading brands as uncool or politically incorrect, or become an identifier of a new, powerful, high-prestige group to which others want to belong (Ray Bans, for instance, in Men in Black). A powerful new musical group can instantly lift an orphan brand to badge-of-belonging status for fans and groupies if the band uses the branded item as part of their grand spectacle.

Unknown brands live in the netherworld of scary products or services about which you know nothing nor do you care to know. Occasionally, something from this space bursts into brandspace—the MITS Altair and Imsai 8080 microcomputer kits that got Bill Gates and the personal computer revolution started in the late 1970s, for example.